Do voters forgive T-Rack for saying this would be his last term as D.A. and then changing his mind? If history serves, there's no question they'll give him a pass. Tony Rackauckas's pledge came as he was trying to broker a deal to get Todd Spitzer out of the 2006 D.A.'s race. The only person it really impacts is Spitzer, who says he's OK with it. Mike Carona had made a two-term limit a key part of his platform, went back on it, and still got re-elected sheriff in 2006 - even though his political star had really dropped. Rackauckas's office has been scandal free of late, and if that holds, not enough voters will care about his aborted retirement to make a difference. But this does reinforce my belief we should never take such political pronouncements too seriously in the first place.

Besides my interview with Spitzer, a couple of other interesting tidbits came out of my attendance at a Republican lawyers meeting at Chapman Law School last week. Assemblyman Chuck DeVore told the group how even as a member of the minority party in the Legislature, he's trying to be relevant. He's working a bill that would suspend the California Environmental Quality Act for five years for low-income housing, farm-worker housing and urban infill projects. The strategy, he said, is to split the Democrats in the Legislature into two factions: the black and Latino caucuses, which favor the bill because it would reduce housing costs 10-20 percent for constituents, and what he called "the white, urban limousine liberals," who oppose lowering environmental standards. "I'm purposefully eff-ing with them," DeVore said.

Wow, I thought, it is so refreshing to hear a politician be so candid in front of a journalist. Then I went up to him and asked whether his ploy wasn't "just a little cynical" - and he turned even whiter than a limousine liberal. He hadn't realized I was in attendance, even though I had stood right in front of him talking to Spitzer before the meeting started and I swear we made eye contact. Maybe it's because I shaved my beard since he last saw me. In any case, give him credit for answering my question. It's not cynical, he said, because he really believes the CEQA standards should be dropped. Nope, there's no doubt about that.

Then Shawn Steel, the immediate past president of the California Republican Party, told these young, impressionable Chapman law students that when you consider how the American media is covering the Iraq war now, we should thank God there hadn't been an omnipresent press in the colonies in 1776. The revolution was going so poorly for us at that point, he said, media pressure would have forced the Continental Army to give up and "we'd all be speaking some other form of English." He drew his information from the well-regarded 2005 book, "1776," by David McCullough. The next day, I went to Barnes & Noble in Fashion Island and bought it.

I got no farther than Page 9, when I came upon this analysis of the British press at the time - a press that was omnipresent in London. "To much of the press and the opposition in Parliament, the American war and its handling could not have been more misguided." Then McCullough quotes directly from no fewer than four British papers, including the Evening Post, which called King George's overseas escapade "unnatural, unconstitutional, unnecessary, unjust, dangerous, hazardous and unprofitable." So, had a certain George listened to hiscackling, omnipresent press in 1776, America would have been free about five years earlier and thousands of lives would have been spared. Just so the Chapman students get a fuller appreciation of the First Amendment.

I give pollster Adam Probolsky grief from time to time, as I did Monday, but I also need to credit his prognostication skill. The latest was the supervisorial race. About four days before the election, I asked him to predict the outcome. " Janet (Nguyen) by fewer than 150 votes," he said. As the case heads to appellate court, she has a three-vote lead. Yeah, he was working for her, but I wasn't going to print it until after the election, so you can't write it off as some lucky spin - this is what his numbers were showing. And, remember, conventional wisdom had Janet third, at best. I think I wrote earlier that about a week before last year's sheriff's election, Probolsky had Carona getting 51 percent of the vote. He wrote it on a slip of paper I still have somewhere. Carona got 50.9 percent. Even for a pro, hitting these margins is uncanny.

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